Tuesday, August 26, 2014

VMworld General Session (Day 2) - Live from VMworld

Ben Fathi VMware's Chief Technology Officer takes the stage. Ben reiterates Pat's message on a liquid world that requires a friction free IT system. In todays session they will be delivering some demos of the product announcements yesterday. Ben introduces Sanjay Poonen the Executive Vice President and General Manager, End-User Computing.

Sanjay mentions that they have done 3 aquisitions. Sanjay says the world is changing and sites the fact that their is more technology in todays automobile than in some of the original rocket ships. VMware's mission is Secure Virtual Workspace for Work at the Speed of Life. Sanjay is here to explain what VMware is doing in three key areas: Desktop, Mobile and Content. In each category the software must be world class but tie into a SDDC architecture. VMware is bringing the entire stack together.

Sanjay mentions that with Horizon 6 they delivered unified VDI and App Publishing on a single platform. In addition they have launched DaaS using DeskTone and today are announcing Application as a Service from VMware vCloud Air. He teases a CloudVolumes demo. A video is shown of google chrome users leveraging View desktops on the NVIDIA grid to deliver a rich 3D user experience.

Sanjay introduces Kevin Ichhpurani the SVP from SAP to discuss the VMware and SAP partnership. Kevin explains that mobility is key in their customer base. Through the partnership SAP is integrating their APIs with VMware AirWatch to deliver seamless management. The benefit for customers is with preintegrated solutions their is less TCO.

Sanjay mentions United Airlines who is one of Apples largest iPad customers who are managing the devices through AirWatch for security. Sanjay announces a new suite which is is modelled after the vCloud Suite. Sanjay mentions that they have leap frogged the competition and are now number one according to the analysts.

Sanjay introduces Kit Colbert (@kitcolbert) the CTO of End User Computing who is going to dive into some sample use cases. Kit mentions healthcare and works through a day in the life of a doctor. It begins with VMware workspace portal for using applications. The doctor then moves to his iPad with no loss of applications. Then the doctor leverages a View desktop for high resolution imaging and finally the secure content locker is used to transfer files through AirWatch. The final piece is a demonstration of both doctors collaborating on the shared image. In the end this is about more time to focus on treating patients.

Kit then shows a demo of CloudVolumes. From within the CloudVolume Admin UI the user is entitled to an application enabling the application to integrate into a View desktop. CloudVolumes leverages hypervisor technology to deliver the applications vs. streaming or pushing. The old delivery methods are not very scalable. Kit mentions project Fargo which clones a running virtual machine is about a second. Project Fargo will be used to clone a virtual machine while CloudVolumes delivers the applications in seconds. The desktop is then destroyed when the user logs out. This really simplifies management and provides tremendous cost reduction along with better secure. This wholestic approach to "just in time desktops" is under development and is called project meteor.

Sanjay summarizes with the value message which provides customers with a complete stack from SDDC to EUC.

Raghu Raghuram the Executive VP of the SDDC and Ben return to stage to demonstrate EVO:Rail. EVO rail is a 2 U form factor built from 4 independant nodes runing compute, storage and networkinig (leveraging virtual SAN). It can perform a rolling upgrade so that maintenance can be done in realtime. It can scale upto a 16 node cluster. The web UI has been simplified but allows some customization. The entire process to stand it up is 15 minutes.

EVO Rack is the second member of this family and comes vCloud Suite, Virtual SAN and NSX. It is built to be deployed within 2 hours. It also includes rack management and 20% of the labs at vmworld are running on EVO Rack.

Raghu mentions that VMware has put in a tremondous amount of effort in Openstack since joining the Openstack project. Raghu believes that the best way to run Openstack is on VMware. This will be a fully supported offering from VMware. The benefit from an IT perspective is that you do not need new skills to run Openstack.

Raghu goes on to mention the vSphere 6 beta which will provide 4 vCPU support for FT. In addition vSphere 6 will have cross vCenter vMotion or the ability to migrate VMs from one vCenter datacenter to a second vCenter datacenter. In addition with long distance vMotion you can literally migrate a VM from coast-to-coast. With NSX you can also ensure that none of the network properties change irrespective of the distance between networks.

Ben explains that VMware is working very hard to deliver "Containers without Compromise" by running them in VMs. Ben makes the point that Containers on their own don't offer many management points however running them on VMs does. VMware is working to make containers a first class citizen on their virtual infrastructure. Ben announces that they are working with Pivotal, Google and docker to run containers on SDDC.

Raghu highlights the vRealize Suite which provides management of the SDDC. You can sign up for the vRealize beta now.

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About Me

I am a Principal Cloud Architect at Long View Systems and have spent 16 years designing, implementing, and managing IT Infrastructures in highly available computing environments. My primary areas of focus are the deployment of virtualization (Server, Storage, Desktop, Application and WAN Optimization).